Startup Newie Ventures trials smart parking at Newcastle Uni

Newcastle-based startup Newie Ventures is piloting a smart parking service that will enable motorists, via a web page to find vacant parking spaces at the University of Newcastle.

For the pilot is has fitted 10 parking spots in the car park south of the Civil Engineering building with RFID enabled sensors that detect the presence of a car by the disturbance it creates to a magnetic field, transmit the information to a nearby ethernet connected reader to the backend in a data centre.

Newie Ventures’ cofounder, Heath Raftery, said: “We’re using a proprietary derivative of RFID [with a range of about 50 metres] The software is a combination of on-site firmware, a MQTT protocol, a IoT cloud environment written in Groovy and JavaScript/HTML web apps.

“This approach enabled us to quickly deploy a real world pilot. We’re continuously feeding the lessons learned back into our own integrated hardware and software platform, which is due to be announced Q1 FY2017.”

Rafferty said the project, Foresight Parking, was “the start of what Newie Ventures envisions for the future of Newcastle.”

Cofounder Anne-Laure Peaucelle, said that, by gathering real time data, the trial would help the company to further develop its product. “It has the potential to help cities around the world to offer cost effective and time saving parking solutions.”